“You’re the scoundrel that was first over the rail and you knocked me endwise with the flat of a cutlass. Take that.”
The impetuous young witness caught the prisoner on the jaw with a fist like an oaken billet and drove him spinning across the room by way of emphatic identification.
Before sentence was pronounced Captain Gibert rose and said in Spanish:
“I am innocent of the crime—I am innocent.” With that he presented a statement drawn up by himself in a “remarkably well written hand” which he desired might be read. After denouncing the traitor Perez, who had turned State’s evidence, the captain stated that Delgardo, before he had cut his throat in jail, had avowed his determination to commit suicide because his extorted and false confession had involved the lives of his companions. He alleged that his boatswain had been poisoned by Captain Trotter on Fernando Po for denying the robbery, and had exclaimed just before his death:
“‘The knaves have given me poison. My entrails are burning,’ after which he expired foaming at the mouth.”
The first mate, de Soto, presented a paper addressed to the presiding “Senor,” in which he protested his innocence, “before the tribunal, before the whole universe, and before the Omnipotent Being.” He went on to say that he was born at Corunna where his father was an administrator of the ecclesiastical rank; that he had devoted himself to the study of navigation from the age of fourteen, and at twenty-two had “by dint of assiduity passed successfully through his examinations and reached the grade of captain, or first pilot, in the India course. He had shortly after espoused the daughter of an old and respectable family.”
(At this point the clerk, Mr. Childs became much affected, shed tears and was obliged for a time to resign the reading of the document to Mr. Bodlam.)
The memorial of Bernado de Soto closed in this wise:
“Nevertheless I say no more than that they (the witnesses) have acted on vain presumption and I forgive them. But let them not think it will be so with my parents and my friends who will cry to God continually for vengeance on those who have sacrificed my life while innocent.”
Manuel Castillo, the Peruvian, “who had a noble Rolla countenance,” exclaimed with upraised hands: